Tag Archives: Technology enhanced learning

“Digital Voices argues that the time is right for post-compulsory education to develop ‘audio-enhanced learning environments.’ The technology is readily available and usable and innovative academics and students are already using it. The recorded voice is being used to capture the knowledge, ideas and enthusiasm of tutors, students, peer groups and mentors, employers, professionals and the general public, among others, adding a new rich seam to the student experience. The book explores the potential of educational podcasting, user-generated media assignments, audio feedback and fifty other pedagogic approaches through essays, case studies and scenarios – all grounded in progressive educational theory.”

SECTION 2: Case Studies ■A journey through audio feedback ■Arriving at audio feedback ■Tutorial audio feedback: a case study ■Audio feedback in sport coaching ■Increasing student engagement with feedback through the use of audio ■Towards vidcasts — a case study in the development and use video podcasts ■From paintbrush to podcast and beyond — engaging staff and students through incremental innovation ■Learning with audio — a student’s reflections on making notes with an MP3 recorder ■Starting a conversation — podcasting within Initial Teacher Education at York St John University ■Bringing students together through a virtual classroom — a study of Wimba Classroom ■Using VoiceThread to enable media-rich online collaborative learning ■Role play replay: technology and media-enhanced experiential learning ■Using digital posters to promote academic literacy ■Sketch blogging — increasing accessibility to self-evaluation using digital media

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A couple of weeks ago Sue Beckingham, who I first met at a SEDA conference invited me to be a facilitator on a new ‘course’ that she and her friend Chrissi Nerantzi had set up. When I heard the words ‘Bring Your Own Devise’ I instantly said ‘Yes’ without really investigating what I’d let myself in for!

I’m really pleased I said ‘Yes’ for a number of reasons. Firstly, its great to have access to the wonderful course Sue and Chrissi have created http://byod4learning.wordpress.com/. It’s a short 5 day course with the main objective of demonstrating and showing the potential of using mobile devices in a learning context. It’s a truly open course, as a participant you don’t have to register and although the 5 days have a series of structured activities its really up to the learners to decide how much they are going to complete. The ‘subject matter is grouped around 5 themes; connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating,creating. In the topics there ar a series of tasks based around different scenarios. So for example, on the first day there is a short YouTube video of a student and lecturer talking about mobiles phones and wondering how useful they could be in their own studies. The sceanarios, resources and structure of the course are great and will be useful to anyone interested in mobile technologies.

The second reason I’m looking forward to the course is to ‘work’ (is that the right word?) along side and with other people from other universities on a specific teaching experience. I’ve not done this before. The only two facilitators I’ve met in person are Sue and very briefly David Hopkins (Learning Technologist at Leicester Uni). Yesterday I had a brief telephone conversation with Andrew Midleton from Sheffield Hallam. All the other other facilitators are from a variety of different institutions: Manchester Met, Uni of Salford, Uni of Huddersfield, John Moores Uni Liverpool. Already we have been communicating with one another via various social media tools, twitter, Skype, YouTube, and rather less successfully for me Google hangouts.

Thirdly, I’m looking forward to the new experience of being a ‘Facilitator’ and what that involves. For 20 years I was a classroom teacher and during that time I really thought of myself as ‘facilitator’ in the classroom. For me, good teaching always involves interaction between students and between the students and myself, so inevitably involves collaboration. My role as the teacher was to create the activities and give instructions, help and feedback in the classroom (and sometimes online). When I started to look at the BYODL4L ‘course’ I realised that the facilitators role was very similar to this but the tools to do this are totally different. Gone is the face to face support and direction. It will be really interesting to see how the social media tools facilitate this type of learning.

On a personal note, I realised I needed more that just asynchronous online direction on my role as a facilitator. On Thursday evening the faciltators met up via Google hangouts to have a group meeting and discussion about our role. For some technical reasons (which I haven’t fully worked out) I was unable to join the meeting. That night and the next morning I started to a bit lonely and peripheral to the group of facilitaors …its such a weird feeling! Anyway the next afternoon I had a good chat with Andrew Middleton one of the facilitators and soon realised that all the things I was thinking were shared by the others too. I needed the chat (on the telephone) to bring me back into the group but I wonder if the participants on the BYOD4L course will feel the same when the we begin on Monday?

Lastly, and maybe this is bit premature because we are not sure how next week is going to go but I’m already thinking about some future developments. I wonder if its possible to run the course again using the BYOD4L website. I was a bit slow off the ground but if I thought about it earlier I could have organised a group of students and lecturers to meet up next week, as a kind of support group for the course. At the last minute I booked a room at my uni, posted an intranet article and sent some a email to people I know who will be interested to have a meeting on Monday lunchtime…not sure if anyone will turn up (also it’s the first week of a new term next week and everyone will be very busy).

The other idea I had for the future is to take the BYOD4L model of a course and see if I can apply to the type of staff development sessions I do here at Regent’s. At the moment I’m setting up the SEDA ‘Embedding Learning Technology’ staff training course and I’m wondering if this could be turned into a collaborative course with other universities (any takers facilitators?)…..

Anyway these are just some early thoughts on the matter….got to cook the Haggis now (its Burns Night tonight!)….looking forward to Monday!!

David Hopkins new short book entitled ‘What is a Learning Technologist’ caught my eye because it’s a question that I’ve asked myself many times. In 2010 after 20 years working as a college lecturer and then lecturer in Higher Education I made the leap over to the ‘dark side’ and became a Learning Technologist at Regent’s University in London. Regent’s is a new University and didn’t previously have anyone doing my role and to be honest they didn’t really know what they wanted me to do. I was lucky and had a manager who had enough confidence in me to let me just get on with things and define my own agenda. My role is still evolving and changing all the time.

The book consists of 12 short chapters that were originally written as blog posts, where the first post appeared in August 2009 and the last in November 2013. David starts with some institutional definitions but then the opening chapters really give a flavour of the diversity of the tasks performed by learning Technologists; championing new learning technology, delivering staff training, one to one support etc. It’s clear from these chapters that the role and duties and even the job titles of learning technologists varies in different institutions.

Another theme that runs through the book is the author’s own professional development. There are chapters on completing and recording the evidence of a ePortfolio on a Postgraduate Certificate in Education, the Certified Member of ALT (CMALT) and the early stages of a MSc in Learning Innovation at the University of Leicester. David provides some really useful advice to anyone thinking of completing these qualifications.

Because the book has evolved out of the blog the author has included many of the comments left at the end of the blog posts. So there are various comments from other Learning Technologists working at different universities. In fact, David also includes a post from another blog by Sarah Horrigan describing the key areas that are required to do the role effectively. This is a real strength of the book as their posts and knowledge add a different dimension to the discussion.

The transition form ‘blog to book’ also gives us an insight into the future. Ideas are not always fully formulated in a blog post but they may then be adapted and recast into something more ‘polished’ at a later date and in this case presented as a digital book that can be downloaded from Amazon. Could this be the future of publishing? We shall see…

A short book like this cannot cover everything in detail and there are some aspects of my job there are not covered. A relatively important part of my role is coordinate small scale projects and whilst I have done some project management training this is a role most learning technologists have to perform at some stage. Also the evaluation of these projects or other aspects of what we do is also another important area worth thinking about.

Overall I enjoyed reading this book. I would even go so far to say it should be essential reading for all Learning Technologists….it will get you thinking and questioning what you do – which is no bad thing!

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Katherine Rose (Information Systems Librarian here at Regent’s University) gave a short presentation on the library’s new search facility, ‘RULDiscovery’ for the ‘Tricks of the Trade’ session. The advertising blub for the session described RULDiscover as the library’s new search engine, ” it searches across our ejournals, databases and library catalogue and brings you full-text results. It’s a powerful search engine and you can refine your results and searches in many ways. Now you don’t have to search in many different places when you are researching. We hope this will be a fantastic research tool for staff and students of all levels'”.

Katherine started with the obvious question ‘How do I access RULDiscovery’? There are two main ways, firstly via the intranet (where there is button labeled ‘RULDiscover’) where you will be asked to log in with your Regent’s Uni username and password. The second access point is via Blackboard where you click on ‘Tate Library’ button – at the top of the screen and then there is a RULDiscovery search box.

Katherine then showed us an example of doing a search. She started with the term’ Human Resource Management’. Obviously this brought up loads of results, in fact it brought up over one million articles!! So then she showed us how to limit the search and make it more specific to our requirements.

So the first thing she showed us were the ‘limiters’ (on the left side of the screen – see below). There are many different ways to get your search more specific.

The first of these is ‘Catalogue Only’, so this eliminates all the electronic resources and therefore we will just be searching what is on the library shelves. So when we search ‘Human Resource Management’ this brought the results down to 173 items (showing ebooks and print books). It then shows you where you can find the book and whether the book is available. It also gives you the ‘Reserve this book’ option.

The next ‘limiter’ is ‘Peer Reviewed’ content, this is really useful as it immediately eliminates all the trade review publications and magazines ie mainly academic journals.

There were further limiters and these included;

Subject

Publisher

Publication

Language

Geography

Location

Databases

There is also the option to limit the search to the publication date, say if we just wanted recent articles of the last 10 to 15 years.

These could be very useful depending on the type of resources we are looking for.

Once you find the resources you can then download it (as a pdf) or share it in different ways (email etc). It is also possible to create your own folder and store your results. The citation options are also very easy to use and these can be directly exported to Endnote.

RULDiscoery does not search every single data base that the university subscribes to but where the these data bases are not included in RULDiscovery extra links are provided to these data bases.

Finally Katherine showed us how to do an ‘Advanced Search’ where for example, we can limit the search to the title of the article or to the abstract. There are further links to eJournals, Blackboard, and the Library home page.

Katherine is very interested from feedback especially from the teaching staff here at Regent’s.

Each of these categories are given a potential ‘Impact Score’ (Low, Medium and High) and ‘Timescale’ (in terms of years). There is also a brief summary of the category and links to further resources. No surprise that MOOC’s are in the top ten and the first one that they look at, giving them a high Impact rating and short timescales – 1 to 2 years. Badges and Learning Analytics have also been discussed (relatively) widely recently and given the authorship of the report it was no surprise to see topics such as Digital Scholarship, Gaming and Crowd Learning on the list. The two area that I found most interesting were Citizen Inquiry and Maker Culture, probably because I am much less familiar with these terms.

“Maker culture encourages informal, shared social learning focused on the construction of artefacts ranging from robots and 3D-printed models to clothing and more traditional handicrafts. Maker culture emphasises experimentation, innovation, and the testing of theory through practical, self-directed tasks. It is characterised by playful learning and encourages both the acceptance of risk taking (learning by making mistakes)and rapid iterative development. Feedback is provided through immediate testing, personal reflection, and peer validation. Learning is supported via informal mentoring and progression through a community of practice” whereas Citizen inquiry “refers to mass participation of members of the public in structured investigations. It fuses the creative knowledge building of inquiry learning with the mass collaborative participation exemplified by citizen science, changing the consumer relationship that most people have with research to one of active engagement”. The report gives several links to some really interesting case studies on these two themes.

Whether the authors are correct in terms of their predictions only time will tell….

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One of the most common comments I get from staff at my University is that they don’t have time to come to training sessions…so over the last few months I’ve created some training videos using the Vine app on my iPhone. Vine was created to enable the user to make six second videos that will be automatically twitted out to your followers. Here are few examples:

keeping to the 6 seconds is the most difficult bit and obviously limits the training but it’s still worth doing. They will reach a limited audience if they are just tweeted out once so I’ve started to embed them into the Uni’s VLE under the FAQ’s page….I’m just testing them out at the moment so it’s too early to say what impact they’ve had but they are really easy to make and embed into Blackboard.

I will follow-up this post up with further examples and some screen shots of how I’ve embedded them into our VLE at a later date…watch this space!

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I recently watched (whilst trying to work in the office) a webinar given by Steve Wheeler on new learning theories for a digital age …it provided a good introduction to recent developments. Here are his slides:

Here is a short-ish video presentation about Blikbook given at Regent’s University on Wednesday 17th April 2013.

“BlikBook is a course engagement platform that is changing the way students engage with academics and peers to aid their learning.

The concept behind BlikBook is that learning should be an open playing field. Outside of lectures students often ask their peers for help and advice or go direct to their professor. We want to give academics the ability to act as curators of knowledge and students to be able to link with peers beyond their immediate friendship group.

BlikBook connects students to a network of students and academics who can best help them, making best use of every ones time and knowledge”.